Archives for March 2016

Remember the olden days of digital marketing when it was enough just to have email segments? This was the same golden era when having a mobile site was considered advanced and SEO was a magical black box.

Today, personalization and segmentation is expected by your superiors, your peers, and even your customers. They know when they’re added to the “spray and pray” marketing list and will unsubscribe before you have a chance to get to know them.

This is a huge challenge for marketers: how do you segment visitors if they don’t have history with the site? The answer lies within the audience buckets you create. When you understand your site the general population of your visitors, you’re able to predict their buying behavior and eventually market to new audiences with desired results.

Let’s rewind and start with the basics: how should you segment your audiences?

Remember that one from childhood? Useful anytime someone had the audacity to toss verbal ninja stars at us…but turns out it was false! Words most definitely can hurt you.

Using certain words could be having a negative impact on your online performance. To paraphrase Napoleon from Animal Farm:

“All words are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Deciding on which words to use – and which to actively NOT use – can be the difference between ranking well in the search engines, and languishing in obscurity (using keywords for SEO). Between a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, and throwing your money away (using keywords for advertising). Words, words, words. If the pen is truly mightier than the sword, we must carefully choose our weapons.

Content has been king for a few years now, but is it still lord of the manor, queen of the castle, um…duke of the duchy (okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch)? The short answer? Yes. The slightly longer answer? Yes, but…

“Content” is changing. It’s a living, breathing animal, but like any beast (and let’s face it, content marketing is a beast), it evolves over time. It’s not just blog posts and a Facebook Page anymore.

Content?

But before we open it up and play doctor, we need to define a few things. What exactly do we mean by content, and content marketing? What’s the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? What do you call the foam on a glass of beer? And what the heck is the day after tomorrow? These are the things we need to know moving forward.

Content Marketing

Creating and distributing valuable, useful, and consistent content to attract a defined audience and achieve a specific goal. The term didn’t really take off until early 2012, but it’s witnessed steady growth since then.

Steve Jobs, who attributed this saying to Pablo Picasso, embodied this concept as a core philosophy in his construction of the mega-brand Apple has become today. What did Jobs find so endearing about this line?

The answer is Steve Jobs intuitively knew what all the great copywriters know: all great ideas start from a swipe file.

You might be thinking “But swiping sounds like plagiarizing…I don’t want to grow my business by stealing!”

That’s a perfectly valid concern. Which is why the first thing we’re going to cover is what a swipe file is versus what a swipe file isn’t. Then we will get into why a swipe file is important for your business, as well as how to build and use a swipe file.